What I thought was "Normal" - Journal Entry 2

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     In my last blog,(Journal entry - Moving forward I will call them Journal entries) I spoke about conscious awareness, subconscious conditioning, and maladaptive survival strategies.  Numerous people reached out wanting me to explain a bit more , so I wanted to write this one to give a little more context. This is not me writing about myself in some grandiose way. If anything, it is the opposite. This is me trying to be honest about the process. Honest about where some of my thinking came from,(The reason I started a blog - that's like a diary)  how certain realizations changed me, and why I speak so much about awareness in the first place. 

        My path toward self-development started years ago,(11 -12 years ago )  and one of the biggest catalysts for that was Eric Thomas. There was a video of his that I watched every single morning. Every single morning, for about four years straight, I played that same video. Something in it -kept pulling on me. At the time, I could not fully explain why, but I knew it was doing something to me...It was waking something up.

One of the things Eric Thomas said that never left me was, “What you’re looking at, what you’re reading, what you’re watching, the conversations you have… you must now be focused on your why, you must be focused on your dreams, and you must be focused on your goals.” That line stayed with me because it made me realize I needed to pay attention to what I was feeding myself, What I was absorbing. 

          It made me start thinking more deeply about how we take in the world around us- in the first place. We are given these tools to perceive life — sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell — and all of that information gets sent to the brain. Yet the brain is still responsible for interpreting it, assigning meaning to it, and building a definition. That realization hit me hard. The world may give us information, but the mind decides what that information means. Once I understood that, I started taking my inputs far more seriously, because I realized I was not just consuming things casually. I was shaping the lens through which I understood life.

That season of my life began changing the way I consumed everything. Music started turning into podcasts. Time spent scrolling social media turning into books, self-help, and content that challenged me to think. The shows I watched mindlessly turned into documentaries or things of "substance". I remember I even started using Gaia before it became as big and popular as it is now, back when the content felt less mainstream and more intimate to me. I was looking for anything that stretched my perspective beyond what I had grown up around or what I had become accustomed to

And once I started changing what I consumed, I started changing what I thought about.

The more I learned, the more inquisitive I became. The more inquisitive I became, the more I began to realize something that was both humbling and unsettling: I knew very little. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a performative way. I just began to understand that so much of what I believed, so much of what I assumed was “just life,” had never really been examined introspectively.  In many ways, I started to understand the wisdom in what Socrates meant when he said he neither knew nor thought that he knew. There was something freeing about that realization. Admitting what I did not know did not make me feel smaller. It gave me somewhere to begin.

That realization led me to another one. If I only knew what I had been taught, then I needed to evaluate my teachers, not from the lens of student, but from the lens of a peer. 

        This was a interesting realization - because I started looking at my parents, the adults in my family, and the environment I had been raised in through a different lens. Not from a place of arrogance. Not from a place of disrespect. From a place of awareness. I began to understand that many of the people who shaped me were doing the best they could with what they had, but they were also limited. Limited by exposure. Limited by education. Limited by survival. Limited by what had been handed to them.

If I am honest, that awareness made me resentful. I felt resentment toward what I had been exposed to. Resentment toward what I had not been exposed to. Resentment toward the teachings I inherited, the opportunities "I did not have" and the things I had accepted as truth without ever being given the opportunity from a larger frame of reference.

I sat in that resentment, but not for long...

I could not stay angry at humans who did the best they could with what they had. They may not have known more. They may not have seen more. They may not have been given the tools, language, or access or frame of reference - that would have allowed them to teach differently. At first, awareness cultivated resentment. Eventually, It matured into responsibility. Once I could see it clearly, I could no longer leave the work in someone else’s hands. It rested with me.

That changed everything. - It became my responsibility to examine what I knew, what I did not know, and what I had mistaken for truth simply because it had been repeated long enough to feel normal.

        One small example that I can share to emphasis this  is  "grocery shopping." Growing up, I thought grocery shopping once a month was normal. That was just what I knew. That was the rhythm. It was not until I moved out on my own and started buying fresh fruits and vegetables for myself that I realized they were going bad before I could use them. I started asking "why?"  and it hit me...I had been conditioned to shop once a month because that was when food stamps came in. I had internalized that rhythm so deeply that I thought it was just how people grocery shopped. Once a month. Every month. In abundance. I assumed that was standard and the manner in which "People just went grocery shopping". 

The same thing showed up in cooking. Coming from a multifamily home, I was used to meals being prepared in portions that could feed ten or more people. So when I got a place of my own, I still cooked in that way. I was cooking for a house that no longer existed around me. I ended up with more leftovers than I could finish, more food than I needed, and once again, I was confronted with how deeply old environments can continue living through you long after you leave them.

I began to realize that many of the things I thought were "normal" were not universal truths. They were inherited patterns. Some were passed down to me directly. Others I created on my own through limited belief systems, limited knowledge, and limited exposure. Either way, they were still shaping how I lived.

        That understanding gave deeper meaning to the kind of conscious awareness I spoke about in my previous blog. When I mention subconscious conditioning or maladaptive survival strategies, I am talking about exactly this. Sometimes we develop behaviors in response to trauma, pain, fear, or instability because those behaviors help us survive the moment. In that season, they are adaptive. They help us endure. They help us feel safer than we otherwise might. The problem is that many of those same responses do not leave when the moment does. They follow us. And over time, what once helped us survive can begin to work against us, because we are no longer the same person we were when those patterns were first formed. That realization helped me understand that some of what we call dysfunction is, in reality, an old survival strategy still trying to protect a version of us that no longer exists in the same way. That understanding was shaped in part by what I learned through Dr. Paul Conti’s work on trauma, something I can elaborate further at a later time- without in anyway shape or form giving clinical advice. 

Some of those patterns were practical. Some emotional. Some relational. Some mental. Some were rooted in scarcity. Some in fear. Some in love. Some in protection/ personal trauma response. Some in simply never having seen another way, my way of saying "lack of exposure."

However, once I could see them; I could not pretend they were non existent.

       That was the shift. -I began to understand the power of admitting what I did not know. That kind of honesty did not make me feel small. It gave me a real place to begin. It allowed me to stop worshipping familiarity as if it were wisdom. It allowed me to question what had shaped me without hating where I came from. It allowed me to hold compassion for the people who raised me while still taking responsibility for the person I was becoming. My life started to change from then on,  once I could internalize that "not everything I inherited was meant to be carried forever", I also began to understand that I did not have to keep living the way I had been living...

I could choose differently.

I could think differently.

I could interrupt patterns of behavior - distinguish which one's served a purpose  not for who I was but for who I wanted to become, and which one's I could leave behind, in effort to evolve. 

I could challenge beliefs.

I could begin moving toward a life that was not built only from sub conscious conditioning, but from intention. (A lot of this concept/topic, I also refined later on in my life through the teachings of Dr Joe Dispenza) 

I did not fully know how. I just knew I wanted something different. I knew I wanted to stop living by default and start living by design. I knew I wanted to create a life that reflected awareness, alignment, and choice instead of repetition or subconscious living- 

The search for self and the work of self-development, in my opinion, should be lifelong. There is always more to uncover, more to unlearn, more to refine, and more to understand. Even now, I do not write from a place of arrival. I write from a place of process. This much I know for sure: the moment I realized that much of what I had called normal was actually conditioning, I could not go back to living unconsciously.

I knew I wanted to manifest a different life.

I just did not yet know how...but that part,

That part comes next.

With gratitude,
Mr. E
Reflections of Mr. E